The invention relates to a method and a device for constructing a shackled conveyor belt from premade helical elements alternately with a left handed thread and a right handed thread, wherein the spires of adjacent helical elements are alternately pushed into each other and a connecting wire is fed through the channel formed by the interlaced spires of adjacent helical elements.
Heretofore, the pushing of the helical elements into each other was performed by hand, wherein only the introducing of the connecting wires was performed by means of a mechanical device of the type described in DE-AS No. 30 01 472. The shackled conveyor belts made in this manner usually consist of helical elements with an oval cross section made of plastic monofilament which are connected with each other by plastic connecting wires and are used, for example, as paper machine screens, conveyor belts, etc., wherein their light weight, the good stability and the manufacturability of large belt widths are advantageous.
In the DE-AS No. 30 17 378 which is not a prior publication, there is further described a method of the aforementioned type and a corresponding device, wherein always three or more helical elements are drawn through a wedge-shaped closing slot and are thereby pushed into each other. However, this mode of operation is disadvantageous in that the tension forces serving for the movement of the helical elements result in defective joints, due to the unavoidable minor differences occuring in the closing slot, whereby a plurality of spires of a helical element are pushed immediately adjacent between two spread apart spires of an adjacent helical element. In addition, when using three or a plurality of helical elements, the intermediate ones cannot be accurately fed, so that the connecting wires cannot be properly introduced.